Maintaining......

I think the first step is to stop making excuses for why you are putting on weight and realise that it is so easy to do it when you eat chips,fatty food, too many carbs, chocolate, deserts, biscuits, and drink sugary drinks.

Not singling anyone out here by the way I mean generally.

In WWI and WWII people were rationed (enforced diet) and almost nobody was fat. They also had a lot of worry I know, but they couldn't over eat because there was not enough food in the first place.

I meant that until I was 50 I had a black and white attitude to losing weight. 'Eat less, simples' Once I hit 50 I began to realise that it wasn't that simple.

Nor do I think that my eventual weight loss was due to eating less on the 5:2 diet. In the interim (and the interim lasted nearly 15 years), I tried a lot of diets, including several where I ate less overall than on the 5:2 regime but my weight lost would be limited to about 5lb, which would be frequently return while I was still on the diet. I have no idea why the 5:2 worked when others didn't, but I do think the pattern of 'feast and famine', which is the essential basis of the 5:2 affects the way you metabilise your food.

The problem is people do make sweeping statements and then insult or are dismissive of anyone overweight. I am merely saying that I deplore the way overweight people, as a group, are demonised and accused of stuffing their faces, never taking exercise etc etc, without anyone bothering to look at them as individuals, whose story and life may actually be very different.

At 8 tonight there is what should be an interesting proramme on Channel 4 on super slimmers and whether they managed to keep the weight off.

You are of course suggesting I have a black and white attitude - rubbish, but as I can't seem to get you to enter into a dialogue and you persist in thinking as you do, I think I'd better ignore your posts on this subject.

Saw that programme Badenkate - rather deoressing for those poor souls who lost such a lot of weight to be told it was inevitable that 90-95% would regain it. No solutions offered, except just possibly a punishing exercise regime. But I did find certain comments from those who had regained all their weight quite revealing.

Generally it was saying that if you'd been obese, there was little point in trying to diet and lose weight because you would probably regain it after a couple of years, and some!

I saw last nights's programme. It only enhanced my belief that weight loss is far more complicated than stopping eating.

I was shocked by the the American man who lost 20 stone and ended up with a metabolism that has slowed down so much that he put on weight if he consumed more than 1600 calories a day. He was a big man, I do not mean overweight, but he must have been around 6 foot tall with broad shoulders.

The concentration of attention and publicity should be on not putting the weight on first place, where possible, because once on it gets more and more difficult to lose the more you try.

An interesting programme. Those super-slimmers who appear on TV have huge weight losses in such a short time, seemingly as a result of total removal from everyday life e.g. extreme diet, full-time fitness trainer, medical monitoring, etc., so it's no surprise that the weight piles back on once they get back to a normal homelife.

Regarding the two British women (one young and out buying flowers, the other with Rosemary Conley) who have since regained a lot of weight. Does anyone remember, did they follow an extreme diet/exercise regime for their original weight loss?

No solutions offered, except just possibly a punishing exercise regime

Yes Anya that was quite a telling moment, in relation to keeping the weight off, particularly as it was said by a doctor.

But .....what about those who have lost weight through bariatric surgery? Most of those do keep the weight off, simply because their stomach capacity is drasticallly reduced?

PS I always feel sorry for those who end up with the baggy skin problem after weight loss.

It was an interesting programme, and the message seemed to be that extreme dieting messes up a person's metabolism. As far as I could see, none of the people who had regained the weight were eating a bad diet, none of them had slipped back into bad habits, they had just started eating normally. I would have liked a more in depth programme explaining it better perhaps as this is such an important subject.

But Gill it does seem to contradict the experience of those who undergo bariatric surgery

A friend of a friend had a gastric band a year or two ago and from what I can see doesn't look much different. I've seen stories of people eating the same calories overall after surgery, as they just have smaller but more frequent meals, but I don't have personal knowledge of this.

With the more radical gastric sleeve, absorption is affected so maybe that's more effective.

From what I have heard people with all kinds of bariatric processes, risk their health by finding ways round the limited eating the system is meant to place on them.

A quick google suggests that a third or more of patients put weight back on after the initial loss and some even return to their original weight.

Well 30% is much better then 95%

I don't think you can look at the this as just 'why do people eat too much and get fat?'. There is a much wider question here: what is different now to X years ago (put in whatever number you like for X)?
Immediately, you think of: less physical requirements at work or home; wider variety of food; more money to spend on food; advertising; more leisure time; easy access to fast food; busy lives needing quick meals....
Particularly, the fast food that is available is designed to appeal to our inbuilt need to store against hunger - however unreasonable that seems to our conscious mind. We and the US are the most obvious 'victims' of this assault, but other countries are catching us up. When we moved to Switzerland in 1990, it was unusual to see overweight children and adults: when we left in 2005, it was becoming quite common. Holidaying in Sicily last year and going to a restaurant full of local people, we ordered the pasta - and were about the only table that did. Everyone else was eating pizza.
I'm not offering any solutions - I'm sure others will do that. But you have to study a problem in its entirety, and not offer facile conclusions which ignore many other variables.

What facile conclusions?

I saw last nights programme about slimmers who lost a great deal and put most or all of it back and I did feel quite disheartened afterwards. I have lost and gained all my life not HUGE amounts but a stone or two but I know it was because I slipped back not to eating fast food which I have never liked but really good food, restaurant meals, lovely chocolate, cheese too much wine that kind of thing. At the moment I am on the NHS Choices 14 week 1400 calorie diet and its working but it looks like I'll be on it forever if I don't want to regain the weight. I agree with a previous poster that the doctor featured seemed to be saying in her view that dieting confuses the metabolism but she didn't offer a solution.

The facile conclusion that it's all down to will-power - or lack of it.

I've just caught up. It was interesting that the guy who'd kept the weight off said that "diets work", whilst the general consensus of the programme was that "diets don't work".

It seemed to me that the dieters who'd lost weight and put it back on had gone back to their old eating habits. So it's hardly surprising that the weight went back on, really....

One thing that wasn't clear to me: do people who have lost lots of weight, and quickly, have an increased propensity to put the weight back on? Are people who have always been slim less likely to pile weight on? not sure I'm making sense.

teetime 1400 calories is quite generous if you want to lose weight slowly and maintain it. In my humble opinion, anyway.